2013-09-07

Every now and then, friends ask me how to get started with meditation. I'm a longtime Vipassana meditator, and definitely recommend that people try it out. But the minimum time commitment to learn the specific practice I do is a 10-day course.

That's a bug chunk of time, so I rounded up a few resources for getting started that require just 10-15 minutes of sitting:

This 25-minute, "Mini Anapana for All" audio is a great introduction from Goenka; the first 15 minutes are the important part. It suggests a regular practice of 10-15 minutes per day, morning and evening.

2013-08-10

I just bought a new pair of shoes, and during the checkout process I was asked to join the store's "VIP" membership program by sharing my full name, zip, email, etc. Apparently this would grant me an immediate 10% in savings, and extend my "trial window" (during which I could return the shoes) from 30 to 90 days.

I told the person handling the checkout that I'd prefer to not join the program, yet she persisted in trying to sell me on it. I declined again, which surprised her — it didn't seem like she'd often encountered someone so willing to pay "full retail price" for their items, when the "VIP" program had such obvious benefits.

Then she said, "I'm going to get in so much trouble for this." I asked her to elaborate, but she didn't share further details about why she'd get in trouble.

2013-04-27

"Being a rapper is one of the most narcissistic careers in the world. You are surrounded by yourself: interviews, Twitter, Facebook, Billboard charts, YouTube plays, shows, the crowds, awards etc. Fame suffocates the spirit and consumes you if you let it. You wake up thinking about you, and go to bed thinking about you. That’s not a good place to be."

2013-02-23

It's amazing to see the path Bungie has traveled. They made a couple of Macintosh games in the early 90s, then had a breakout hit Marathon in 1995 on the Mac, back when serious gamers played Doom on the PC and laughed at the Mac (maybe they still do?).

2013-01-26

"It might seem kind of strange for a company to build a search engine — a pretty costly undertaking — using criteria that it knows to be debased, to be anything but objective. But to Facebook, it’s business-as-usual. Here’s the difference between Google and Facebook: Larry Page recognized that commercial corruption was a threat to his ideal. For Mark Zuckerberg, commercial corruption is the ideal."

I've always admired Google for having a clearly-articulated mission and set of values since its earliest days. And even if these weren't fully-formed when Larry and Sergey first started hacking on PageRank, the company culture they created was such that values guided their choices.

Facebook, however, started as an adolescent prank, and seems to have bolted on a mission and values much later on, as-needed by outside circumstances.

Followup, 2013-01-29: Chuck pointed me to this CNN article about Clay Christiansen, which describes our "capitalist's dilemma" where companies are essentially trapped in a cycle of over-focusing on efficiency innovations, which are great for them in the short term but detrimental in the long term. Instead they should be focusing on "empowering innovations," which create new markets and jobs, and improve the economy for everyone (not just their own balance sheets).

2013-01-19

"We generate all this cash and don't have any use for it." —Jimmy Lee, vice chairman J.P. Morgan's investment bank

I'm sure there are plenty of things in the world that could benefit from someone else's excess cash, things that would make the world a better place / feed the hungry / improve the environment / etc. But companies operating without higher principles end up in situations like these. Dave Goldberg should read Let my People Go Surfing.

2013-01-15

I didn't know Aaron well, but was fortunate enough to hang out with him a few times during his short but brilliant life. Despite his age I always considered him a role model, for his technical prowess as well as his vision, idealism and passion. He didn't just think and talk about how the world could be better, he devoted his life to actually making it better.

One quick, trivial memory I'll share, from the first time we connected — back in ~2005 he posted something on his site about his server's hard drive crashing, so a few of us from blogger-team paypal'd him some $ to buy a new one; he would have been ~19 years old at the time:

A few months later we got to meet him in person, when he visited Google for lunch, and I saw him a couple more times over the years, at conferences and whatnot — throughout I've remained a fan of his writing, causes and code.

Dan Gillmor: "We can honor Aaron’s life in the best way by doing what he did at his amazing best. We can work to expand an open Net and society, and to make “liberty” a word that means something again."